Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

From techcrunch:

If you are an entrepreneur trying to figure out how to navigate your way to a pitch session with them, below is a cheat sheet with the basics you should know.

• A $100 million fund (that is the amount of capital allocated over the next 12 months).  “We don’t have to invest $100 million this year,” notes Maris, “it is what we want to do.”
• It will focus on seed and early stage startups across any industry, but “won’t invest in a company that we don’t think we can properly vet and understand,” says Miner.
• The first two portfolio investments are Pixazza (”AdSense for images”) and Silver Spring Networks (smart grid technology).
• The sole limited partner is Google
• All venture investing from the company will now be done through Google Ventures (for instance, Google.org will no longer be making venture investments)
• Larger strategic investments in the range of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars will still be done by Google’s corporate development team led by David Lawee
• One-way mirror policy to protect startups from prying eyes. “We can look into Google, but Google can’t look into the companies without asking,” promises Miner.
• Overriding investment criteria will be ROI, not strategic motivations.
• But that doesn’t mean strategic considerations will be ignored either.  “If a company comes in the door and it looks like something important for Google to acquire,” says Maris, “we will defer to Google’s corporate development department to take a look.”

I think entrepreneurs need to be careful when taking money from institutional investors as there can be unwritten strings attached and conflicts of interests. With regards to google ventures, this is a problem only if you are a web or media company. Imagine if twitter or facebook had taken investment from google ventures. You get the idea.